Where Does This Stuff Come From?

In this morning's Denver Post there is a review of Can't Find My Way Home : America in the Great Stoned Age 1945 - 2000 by Martin Torgoff. The review by Steven Rosen States:

At a time when most Americans were optimistically celebrating our victory in World War II, the first of the contemporary drug acolytes saw the horror of a ravaged world that had barely survived the catastrophe.

And those seers - people like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, the Denver-raised Neal Cassady and a few others who eventually would become known as the Beats - wanted a spiritual alternative. A new vision to what they saw as "the Great Molecular Comedown" of the post-war world.

"Others had fought in the battle, but it would become (their) peculiar lot to perceive and digest the meaning and magnitude of the Second World War, the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb and the bitter, uneasy peace that followed, as they experimented with drug-induced altered states of consciousness," Torgoff writes. "From the outset, there had been strong intellectual and artistic motivations behind their pursuit of drugs - what Ginsberg would later call 'the ancient heavenly connection' in 'Howl."'

Their particular lot to perceive and digest the meaning and magnitude?! These are the "acolytes" that are leading us into what?

The review then does touch on some of the "problems" associated with drug addiction such as:

And check out this nightmarish passage about a crack-addicted woman undergoing cocaine psychosis and hallucinating about bugs under her scalp: "Suzie's (bugs) would never crawl out, so she had to dig them out with sharp objects: paper clips, metal nail files, letter openers, the smallest blade of a Swiss Army knife."

But that is one paragraph out of a review that refers to Timothy Leary as a pioneer. Well, I guess anyone that technically is the first is a pioneer, but is the connotation really to include individuals as "pioneers" of self-destruction.

There was an article that perhaps explains the real reason behind the "acolytes" actions. Here's an excerpt:

"All substance abuse is frequently marketed as enhancing sex life or making you more attractive or a better social companion," said John Walters, the drug czar for President Bush.